A FANTASTIC Evening

Last night Katherine and I had the chance to attend the taping of Jon Stewart's Daily Show with a friend of ours from the kids' school who used to work at Comedy Central. We got the total VIP treatment - hanging out in the employee lounge before being seated in the studio, getting seated first and in totally prime seats (on the front row just to the right of Jon Stewart in the video below), and meeting Jon after the show (he's really down to earth!).

It was cool to see all the work that happens behind the scenes to put on a tv show and fun to be in the audience. One highlight was watching the comedian who came out before Jon Stewart to warm up the crowd; he's a guy by the name of Quentin Heggs, and he's very, very funny (sorry, couldn't find any videos online which are safe for the blog). Who knew there were comedians to warm up the crowd?

After the show we walked a couple of blocks to a terrific restaurant called Taboon at 52nd St. and 10th Avenue here in New York City (here's the New York Magazine review of the restaurant). The bread at the restaurant is absolutely fantastic; we had both a plain loaf (which we ate with tatzik)i as well as a drippy, goopy, cheese-filled loaf. Fantastic!

In some ways the real highlight of the evening was meeting New York Times technology columnist David Pogue and his wife. I've been a huge fan of his writing (blog posts, NYT columns, and books) for some time now, so it was really cool to meet him in person. Here's how it happened: right after we were seated, a couple sat down next to us. I struck up a conversation with the woman, who was sitting right next to me, noting that she had a copy of Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness (mentioned previously on The Longest Run here). We went through the usual questions - where do you live, where do you work, what do you do, etc.. The man looked sort of familiar to me and once he said 'technology writer, New York Times,' I knew exactly who it was. We had a long chat before the show, including a demo of his MacBook Air with a wireless broadband modem as mentioned on his blog this week). In person he's just like you'd expect based on reading his blog and columns - funny, friendly, outgoing, and really enthusiastic about great technology. The one thing I didn't get to tell him is that my link to his review of the Flip Video Camera became a big source of traffic to my blog (relatively speaking, given that The Longest Run doesn't exactly have TONS of readers). Even today, if you google 'Pogue flip', my post is the second result.